Snap Spectacles? You Don’t Need Them, and that’s the Truth

It seems that lately, since it’s the holiday season, Snap seems to be attempting to revive their Spectacles as a holiday gift idea. We give you this advice: Don’t even think about it. It’s not worth, and you don’t need them, even as a novelty tech idea. You’re better off buying the Snap Spectacles as a novelty sunglass for summer rather than for its tech side because simply put, it isn’t even user-friendly.

Why is Snap trying to revive its glasses again? Well, hundreds of thousands of Spectacles are just sitting around in warehouses unsold. In some warehouses, massive piles of unassembled Spectacles sit unsold as well, contributing to Snap’s enormous losses. Sales were very low in some areas due to the vending machine-type of selling that was cumbersome. The retention rate was low after people tried them out, and physical and social media word of mouth eventually contributed to the camera sunglasses’ downfall.

Snap Spectacles as a sunglass is totally cool actually, but it’s the hardware that people were going after and it is the hardware that failed miserably. Here are the areas where Snapchat fell from grace.

Videos don’t automatically upload in HD

Recorded videos from the glasses won’t upload in HD on your phone, so the videos will appear pixilated or blurry. You can opt to upload HD versions of those videos, but this requires connecting to the Wi-Fi inside Spectacles, a very time-consuming process.

It’s hard to get hold of recorded videos after recording them

What’s the use of recording a video if you can’t access them immediately? Using the Snapchat app to find videos you’ve recorded almost feels like rocket science. This non-user-friendly part of the Spectacles is what brought the glasses to failure. Also, you need to watch each video in order so you can’t select just any video and watch it.

It doesn’t do well in low light

Pity to those who brought their Spectacles to a nighttime or outdoor evening party, only to fail miserably. Even when recording indoors in broad daylight, the glasses could barely make out anything in front of it, even with some lights turned on. When relying only on window light, the screen was completely dark.

There’s no real-time video playback

With other cameras, this is a permanent doable, but with Spectacles, you can’t. And because the lens has a fish-eye effect, it’s hard to tell what gets captured in the frame. It would have been better if Snapchat could just automatically use any phone’s camera app to connect with Spectacles for video playback.